Writing is selection. Just to start a piece of writing you have to choose one word and only one from more than a million in the language. Now keep going. What is your next word? Your next sentence, paragraph, section, chapter? Your next ball of fact. You select what goes in and you decide what stays out. At base you have only one criterion: If something interests you, it goes in—if not, it stays out. That’s a crude way to assess things, but it’s all you’ve got. Forget market research. Never market-research your writing. Write on subjects in which you have enough interest on your own to see you through all the stops, starts, hesitations, and other impediments along the way.

This one is reminiscent of W. Zinsser's notes in On Writing Well. He makes the argument that one has to first trim out as much as possible, before considering adding back embellishments.

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Well, I worried about that. I sometimes don't like to confess how little I know about these things when I start them, but I'm starting to admit to myself that the less I know at the beginning probably the better it's going to go.

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Rather than write a story true to the character or true to his situation, I wrote a puzzle piece to fill in negative space that didn’t need filling in. I don’t know WHAT WE GOT out of it in the end, and in terms of practical advice, if I can’t answer WHAT DO WE GET out of a story, then I don’t have a story.

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less is more in a pitch. Imagine your editor on their most busiest day, on a day when all of their projects are seemingly on fire and due at the printer by lunch time, and then imagine that YOUR email is the one that comes in their inbox. A page. TWO pages at the most for a pitch. Unless they tell you otherwise.]

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Continuity – the strict adherence of prior texts and their treatment as sacrosanct records – paralyzes comics all too often. It punishes new readers by their virtue of being new. It rewards trivia over opening up the world and blazing new trails. It cuts the pie into smaller pieces instead of making the pie bigger. It builds barriers and creates gatekeepers. And it’s really hard to write well.

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When you write something, you never know who it is going to affect, or how it could help someone who’s struggling and feeling alone, or how in a low moment in their life, desperately searching on Google for answers, they will come upon your words when they need them most. And despite what our culture will have us believe—that metrics and stats matter above all else, that the number of clicks tells the whole story—somehow, in some calculation, impacting one human being has got to be worth more than all the unique page views and Shares and Likes in the world.